Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Not just sex work, or violence, or prostitution, or women or trafficking

Since I regularly refer to my proposal of a few years ago for the cultural study of commercial sex, here is the original article. A cultural framework is suggested as an alternative to a tradition that has produced the same knowledge over and over, usually about an abstract idea called prostitution that has no stable meaning, rather signifiying all sorts of different things to different people of different social classes and cultures. Commercial sex as a concept takes in everything you might call prostitution and anything else that involves the exchange of sex for money, or sex for presents or benefits – anytime, anywhere (to get away from research that simply does what’s been done before about prostitution but now in a new city! or country! or part of town!).

The follow-up to the framework article came in 2007 when I did a special journal edition with eight articles using the cultural framework. This is all more relevant than ever, because so much research – not to mention campaigning – relies on scanty knowledge of what is actually going on. Click the title to get the pdf.

The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex - Sexualities, 8, 5, 618-631 (2005).

It begins like this:

Why create this framework

Societies’ twin reactions to commercial sex – moral revulsion and resigned tolerance – have paradoxically permitted its uncontrolled development in the underground economy and impeded cultural research on the phenomena involved. Affirmations that the global sex industry is growing and its forms proliferating are conventional in government and non-governmental fora, in the communications media and in scholarly writing. Commercial sex businesses and trafficking for sexual exploitation are blamed for massive violations of human rights, but the supporting information is unreliable, given the lack of agreement on basic definitions, the difficulty of counting clandestine objects and the fact that much of this stigmatized activity forms part of conventional social life.

Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same. The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, interdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from studies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are instead examined only in terms of ‘prostitution’, a concept that focuses on transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations (Sanchez, 2003; Agustín, 2004b, 2005). With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intransigent stigmatization of these women. While the sexual cultures of lesbian/gay/ bisexual/ transgender people are being slowly integrated into general concepts of culture, commercial sex is usually disqualified and treated only as a moral issue. This means that a wide range of ways of study are excluded. A cultural-studies approach, on the contrary, would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex.

The purpose of this article is to point out the scarcity of research in these areas and reveal the kinds of issue that are up for study. Although public debate and academic theory on commercial sex abound, few participants are familiar with the wide variety of forms and sites involved; most are dealing with stereotypes and interested solely in street prostitution. This is an area where more information and images need to be disseminated, a project for which I make a small beginning here with some descriptive material from Spanish sex venues.

Since this is the beginning of what I hope will become a new field, I do not here offer any solutions to what is too often characterized as a ‘social problem’. Rather, I hope to interest others in taking up the call to study not ‘prostitution’ but the sex industry in new ways and to gather much more information on the object of governance before offering blanket solutions. This does not mean that important moral and ethical issues are not at stake nor that there is not widespread injustice in the industry. On the contrary, my proposal takes these injustices very seriously, laments the absence of workable solutions up to now and hopes that with better research these may be found.

Further headings are How study has proceeded so far, Definitions of the sex industry in general, Local particulars: examples from Spain, Elements of culture and researcher positionality and a raft of good References.

Obviously everything is culture, but for more examples of writing on sex-industry cultures outside the well-worn paths see:

• Contributing to ‘Development’: Money Made Selling Sex
• Working on ships, Travelling by ship
• Sex-industry segments in Spain
• Sex Workers Parade Themselves
• Performance de sexoservicio revolucionario

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist